Red Shift

Everything is shifting red behind my eyelids when they close,
the infrared of wanting painted everywhere she goes
in memory — the kitchen, leaning back against the sink,
the way the cotton clung to wet skin faster than I’d think.

I’m Doppler-shifting toward her from a distance I can’t cross,
the frequency of wanting turning everything to loss
of sleep, of sense, of anything resembling a thought
that isn’t the voluptuous trajectory she’s wrought.

Red shift — everything is pulling,
everything is drawn toward the heat,
she’s the center of the wavelength
and I’m tangled in the sheet.

She bit a peach today and let the juice run past her chin,
and I have been relitigating that original sin
for seven hours — the rivulet from lip to collarbone,
the way she wiped it with her wrist and left me here alone

to reconstruct the moment in libidinous detail,
the tongue, the fruit, the dripping, and the inadvertent trail
across the kind of skin that glows when afternoon light falls —
and now I’m lying in the dark, bouncing off the walls.

Concupiscent and stupid from the replaying of the scene,
the peach, the juice, the throat,
the chest — the most rapacious screen
my mind has ever offered up, and I am captive to it,
febrile, tumescent, sleepless — and I’m going through it

frame by frame by frame again, the insatiable reel,
and there’s no cooling down from what the body’s made to feel
at three a.m. when she’s asleep and I am burning bright,
red-shifted past the visible and deep into the night.